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Outspoken Avondale resident Frank Blount is slowly building a coalition of concerned citizens in his neighborhood.

Blount, along with neighborhood association president Kyle Hamm, brought about 10 other residents out Thursday to a community meeting to express their concerns to city officials. It was more than a month since Blount took a Savannah Morning News reporter on a tour of the community, stopping every few minutes to point out dilapidated houses, overgrown lawns, trashed roadsides and derelict vehicles that he said the city was not addressing.

He has also been introducing himself to other residents in the community to try and get more of them involved in getting the neighborhood cleaned up.

Sharon Fields, who has been living in Avondale for 29 years, said Blount recently got out of his truck and introduced himself when she was outside sweeping.

“I said you spoke to the right person because I’ve had enough,” Fields said.

It was a small group, but most of the residents there had a lot to say about the abundance of blight and crime in the neighborhood. Topics included absentee landlords who let their properties deteriorate, city employees who failed to do their jobs and illegal activities being performed in the open. Many of them said that Avondale tended to not get the same attention from the city as Ardsley Park and Gordonston.

Thirty-eight-year resident Wallace H. Williams Sr. said that he once called the police to see if anybody was working.

“They were selling drugs on Georgia and Louisiana avenues like it was a drive-thru,” Williams said.

Blount said that City Manager Stephanie Cutter was supposed to be at the meeting to hear their concerns, but she did not show up.

“I wish Ms. Cutter was here because that is where the buck stops in town,” he said.

Alderman John Hall, who represents the district in which the east Savannah neighborhood is located, said that some issues had come up at city hall and Cutter was unable to attend. Hall promised that Cutter would be present during the next Avondale meeting, however.

Hall said that the residents had every right to be mad, but that he has only been in office for about a year and a half. Coming after 20 years of “do-nothing” prior to his election, it is going to take some time to address their concerns, he said.

“All these conditions didn’t get like this overnight,” he said.

Hall’s wife, school board member Connie Hall, and Darlene Jackson, a neighborhood coordinator in the city Community Planning and Development Department, also spoke with residents.

A few residents, including Blount, said that the city did increase its presence and enforcement of code violations after a Savannah Morning News article was published about the state of the neighborhood in August. But, they were not satisfied with the degree to which the problems have been addressed.